==Literary fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Lloyd Jones
|title=Hand Me Down World
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ines – although it's a little while before we know her by that name – has quite a story to tell, but we don't hear it from her. We listen to the stories told by people who knew her. They might have worked with her at a hotel on the Arabian Sea or in Tunisia. They might have known her name, but nothing quite so personal as her birthday. She was a good worker, used to anticipating what the guests would need but otherwise being invisible. This might have gone on indefinitely, but she met Jermayne, black like Ines, who taught her to swim. He also gave her what she thought was love and a child, which he then abducted. Ines' story is her journey to Berlin to retrieve her son.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848544782</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Carey
|summary=When we first meet seventy-eight year-old Raphael Haffner, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex with her boyfriend (who doesn't). Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that was confiscated by the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie the age of the author), describes the aging libertine Haffner as ''lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man''. Charming.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539837</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Louise Dean
|title=The Old Romantic
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ken is nearly eighty and he's obsessed with his death and planning his own funeral. He's even helping out on a volunteer basis in the local undertaker's, but what he'd really like is to be back with his family. The trouble is that they've rather moved on. His sister – who seems to have been the perfect woman in his life – is dead. He and his first wife are divorced and he's contemplating the same end to his second marriage. His elder son left home some twenty years ago as Gary and re-invented himself as Nick. At forty he's a solicitor, living with his girlfriend and her twelve-year old daughter and he's happy. He really doesn't want Ken to spoil things, but there are some things which you just cannot avoid. Ken is one of them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490194</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Szalay
|title=The Innocent
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a slim volume but it is tense, taut and has bite. The story see-saws between the 1970s and the late 1940s where much political activity occurs, (there's an understatement) but especially in Russia as far as this novel is concerned. And as we dip into the even earlier period of the 1930s, we get a glimpse of the main character, Aleksandr, as a young man brimming over with political ideology. Along with his fellow students he fervently believed that 'The making of Communism was something sacred to us.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099515881</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sofi Oksanen
|title=Purge
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Estonia 1992. A year after her country has regained independence from the Soviet Union, Aliide Truu is in her remote cottage in the woods, canning tomatoes from a bumper harvest, swatting at ever-present flies, and trying not to think about the neighbourhood boys who persecute her remorselessly, throwing rocks at her windows, and even poisoning her dog. Looking out of the window, she sees a bedraggled girl lying outside. Zara is a sex-trafficked girl from Russia, on the run from her pimps.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848872119</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Evie Wyld
|title=After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
|rating=1
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Frank has moved to his grandparents’ shack by the sea after a tough end to a difficult relationship, and is trying to settle down, get a job, and get to know his new neighbours. He seems to be doing well, until two girls disappear, with suspicion falling on him. Decades earlier, Leon is left to run his family’s cake shop as his father is sent to fight in Korea, before he in turn is conscripted to serve in Vietnam. Things happen to him, although very few of them are of any interest whatsoever. Is there a connection between Frank and Leon? Will either or both of them manage to find happiness? Can author Evie Wyld give us any reason to care?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535831</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicola Barker
|title=Burley Cross Postbox Theft
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=When a bag of twenty seven undelivered letters was recovered from behind a hairdresser's in Skipton it fell to two local policemen to investigate what would become known as Burley Cross Post Box Theft, for it was in the village of Burley Cross, just before Christmas, that the Post Box was forced open and the mail stolen. P C Roger Topping, of the Ilkley force, took over the case from his old school friend Sargeant Laurence Everill without any great hope of success, but the village was in turmoil and something had to be done.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007355009</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Per Petterson
|title=I Curse the River of Time
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This novel is told in the first person by the main character, thirtysomething Arvid Jansen. He's at a painful part of his life when we meet him; he's separated from his wife and he's not coping at all well. As if that wasn't enough personal stress to contend with, he's discovered that his mother is seriously ill. How long has she got to live? How will she cope? And how will Arvid cope?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846553008</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adam Haslett
|title=Union Atlantic
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Doug Fanning appears to be a young man in a hurry. He feels he's done his bit for his country in seeing action in the Gulf War and it's now 'Doug' time. Almost overnight, he's found his vocation and become a banker - a very successful banker. Everything he touches turns to gold. And now he wants to show everyone how well he's done in life and requests that a ''casino of a house'' is built to his luxurious, over-the-top specifications. Nothing wrong with that you may say. The man's earned it, good and proper. Or has he? He's chosen to have his executive house built in an area of mature woodland and traditional homes. It's bound to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. The property market is also extremely buoyant and if Doug chooses to sell he'll make a packet. Win, win situation all round. Or is it?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848874979</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tove Jansson
|title=Travelling Light
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In her home country of Finland – and no doubt throughout much of the rest of Europe which is not quite so sniffy about foreign literature as Britain tends to be – Jansson is generally recognised as an author of talent, skill, verve and wit that extended far beyond the Moomin Troll stories for which she is best known in this country. Those children's books were first published in England sixty years ago and have remained in print ever since (as well as being adapted for just about every other medium going), and a joy they are too, but it is only recently that we have been granted the pleasures of reading her fiction for adults.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095489958X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Matthiessen
|title=Shadow Country
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This is a big book by anyone's standards. Think of your average blockbuster in terms of pages - then double it. Due to its sheer breadth of narrative I think it best if I break it down into manageable book-sized chunks (the novel itself is sub-divided into a trilogy generally known as The Watson Trilogy). First off, there's an explanatory author's note at the beginning to ease the reader in gently, perhaps. I took a deep breath and dived in ...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085705015X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alberto Barrera Tyszka
|title=The Sickness
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=This literary novel is a slow burner. But the very first page gives an insight into the beautiful language used throughout such as 'Medical people rarely used adjectives. They don't need to.' And later on there's another lovely sentence loaded with meaning and originality - 'Blood is a terrible gossip, it tells everything, as any laboratory technician knows.' The opening chapter is located in a consulting room where a rather tense conversation is taking place. The answer is extremely important to one man.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906694508</amazonuk>
}}
